


Mother-In-Law

by Shiggityshwa



Series: Love Is A Doing Word [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Dark Past, Dysfunctional Family, Established Relationship, F/M, Family Issues, Gender Issues, Non-Consensual Pregnancies, POV Cameron Mitchell, POV Vala Mal Doran, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pregnancy, The General Hammond, gender constructions, references Adria - Freeform, references Athena - Freeform, references Qetesh - Freeform, sequel to 2 4 1
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27030292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shiggityshwa/pseuds/Shiggityshwa
Summary: The continuation of 2 4 1, Cam and Vala are waiting out the final weeks of her pregnancy on Thea, while still trying to sabotage any attempt the SGC makes to find the Clava Thessara Infinitas as it leads to a dark world and an even darker past.  Plays a little with the idea of what family means, while having darker moments.
Relationships: Vala Mal Doran/Cameron Mitchell
Series: Love Is A Doing Word [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946749
Kudos: 3





	1. Knock Knock

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry that this took so long to post. The entire story was finished in about a month--but it needs heavy editing, so it takes awhile to get through with the long chapters. The sequel and final part to the saga is currently being written. 
> 
> This also has alternating POVs between Cam and Vala, but there is not pattern as normal--It's more Cam based.

Their lives are always in a constant state of disruption.

He ends up being absent more than he is present after being forced to return to the SGC quite often, which is not something either of them enjoy.

They are able to use rudimentary walkie-talkies for limited, garbled communication and he never spends nights away from her, even if he returns so early in the morning that she’s no longer awake as Thea and Earth’s days are not exactly synched.

Sometimes she’ll be asleep in the bed, feel the mattress depress with his weight, and before she raises the next day he’ll already have left on a trek to the gate.

When he returns home he’s already so tired, that she doesn’t want to burden him with her needs or the baby’s—a life growing bigger within her each day, taking up more room than she has to give, and forcing her to crave things which she lists to Cameron through the static of a faulty device, which results in him bringing back the proper food only half the time. 

The house is also now in need of a grand repair.

Over the course of three days they worked together to patch the bad sides of the building in order to keep the summer heat off of her rapidly growing body, but the roof still needed reshingling, and the porches threatened to crack every time she walked out on them.

But out back, sprouts are growing in neat rows in the field.

He should have returned from Earth over two hours ago, and when she walkied in to get an update—and hopefully some cafeteria chocolate milk—but she received no answer.

She sits and waits, dawdling, with nothing she can really do. She’s taken responsibility for caring for their pittance of crops, which are all watered. The bed is made, the small house is clean, and the only thing needing to be done is constructing the crib in the spare room—soon to be nursery.

All the parts are still strewn over the floor exactly as he left them.

Is considering starting in on creating the generic white cot, but something is making her feel wrong, feel nervous and afraid.

She takes a heaving seat on the porch swing out back, and stares into the darkness of the fields that rest out of reach from the dim lights in the house. Josie jumps next to her, content on curling up, purring against her side as she strokes between her ears.

Suddenly, Josie tenses, her thin head raising and her lithe body jumping down from the swing. The cat takes two steps forward and arches her back, screeching madly at the rows of growing crops.

Hauling herself to stand, the porch groans beneath her, and a suddenly cool wind licks at her bare arms before she hears the footsteps crunch over the dry summer soil.

A few more footsteps fall over Josie’s wild shrieking, until she’s able to discern his form limping towards the house.

She shakes her head at him, all the traveling back and forth to the gate—an hour each way—must have given him a muscle cramp in his already damaged thigh. After almost a week straight of commuting back to Earth, he must be exhausted.

But as he steps into the orange glow of the porch light, into the swirling shadows of night bugs dizzying around the bulb, she can see the streaks of blood on his face.

With the spryness of a woman far younger, and far, far less pregnant, she clears the stairs, meeting him at the bottom. Her fingers flying to his injuries, a gash cut open on his temple, a swollen eye, and a stream of blood from his nose.

“It’s not that bad—”

“What happened?”

“Vala, I swear, it doesn’t—”

“Who destroyed your poor beautiful face?”

“They didn’t destroy it, Baby,” chuckles as he hauls himself up the stairs, taking each step slowly and almost with a slanted foot.

“Go sit down at the table,” she demands, scurrying around him and through the back door first, digging in the mess of a hall closet in search of their first aid kit. Some medical supplies are kept in the washroom, but for injuries as serious as his, something more professional is needed.

“Really, Honey, I just want to have a shower.”

“Sit. Now.”

“Okay.”

He shakily lowers himself to the chair as she snatches the medical kit, and scampers to his assistance.

Snapping the lid open, she readies the supplies she’ll require. Mostly gauze and disinfectant. “What happened?”

“Three guys jumped me while I was walking.”

“Only three?”

“You should—ah—” he hisses as she takes one of the soaked pads of gauze and dabs it over the first open cut on his head. With a strained voice that she knows he’s fighting to control even though his whole face is contorted in a wince, he continues “—see the other guys.”

“Give them a run for their money, did you?” Holds his chin, a little sticky from sweat and dirt kicked up by the small swirls of wind he calls sandstorms roving through the vicinity. Not her favorite weather by far, her arms have come back cut and bruised from being outside when one unexpectedly hits.

Holding a larger piece of gauze to his nostrils, absorbing the blood, she moves one of his hands to keep it in place so she can continue to disinfect the other wounds.

“No. I’m—” dabs at the open cut again, watching the disinfectant bubble up, create a foaming outline “—not as young as I used to be.”

“Nether of us are.” Offers only an automatic response as she’s more invested in cleaning his wounds and tempering the red swelling around his eye. Adding each spent piece of gauze to a growing pile on the table.

But when his hand reaches out, catching hers, and placing a long kiss on the back, she allows him to distract her. “I think I’m feeling it more.”

“You do not want to have a debate on which one of us is more pained currently,” she laughs, drawing her hand away so his is free to stroke the vast expanse of her stomach.

She rarely travels back with him to the base, but when she does, he doesn’t stray from her side. It’s unprovoked and overly appreciated as part of her dreads running into his counterpart in her current state—she doesn’t trust the glint in his eyes.

A glint she’s seen before, but never from Cameron.

“Can you believe they’ll be here in a few weeks?”

The baby, still sticking to routine, settles whenever Cameron is around or in close proximity. The little one has woken her up every night at two in the morning with indigestion, has most likely permanently bruised her kidney, and has even roused Josie with cartwheels when the cat chooses to sleep on, or near her stomach, but still will not kick for their father.

“Seven is hardly a few, Darling.” She pivots, letting him rest his head against her stomach as she starts to pack up their remaining first aid supplies. “Women tend to carry until the end of the forty weeks remember?” When he doesn’t immediately answer her she turns back, finding herself ensnared between his hands. “You do listen to Dr. Lam when we go to those monthly appointments? They were your idea.”

“Sometimes I just get distracted by the ultrasounds.”

Rolls her eyes because of his Tau’ri technology, the need to see what doesn’t need to be seen—what shouldn’t be seen—until an appropriate time. Needing to tear away the wrapping on the present before it’s fully finished.

Dr. Lam always asks her if she wants to know the gender, and she always says it’s the wrong time. No matter the gender it brings up issues. Not the mere social constrictions the Tau’ri and other peoples place on their children, but of rancid memories of losing a daughter and many sons.

Chippie offered to tell her. Knew of her biological makeup—was very likely present for her creation, however unnatural it was—something she’s still grappling with but learning appropriate coping methods for instead of quarantining away from those who care about her. The guardian knew if the child was healthy and their gender, and under no circumstances did she want to know.

The less she knows the better.

“Yes, and I get distracted when they so lovingly use my bladder as a trampoline, but I still heed what the doctor says.” Which lately is a lot. Reminding her to take her vitamins, to relieve herself more often, to eat more balanced meals instead of sugar-coated cereals, to not overexert herself and try to put on weight to remain healthy.

“I got the basics. The not-to-do list.” He’s trying to listen to the child that ignores him, his ear pressing flush to her stomach.

She figures that he is going to spoil this child rotten—not so much with material objects but flourish them with attention. With love. He will never leave this child emotionally starved.

“No heavy lifting, no skipping your vitamins, no chocolate coated sugar-puffed whatever, no strenuous physical activity—though she said we could still—” he waggles his eyebrows at her and she shoves his face away. “It’s not rocket science.”

“Of course, because being pregnant is easy as pie.”

“Cake. It’s ‘easy as cake’.”

“Pies can’t be made from a box of mix, Darling.”

“Sweetheart, You know I respect the hell out of you, and worship the hell out of your body whenever you give me the chance—”

“Yes, of course, how courteous of you to deign to praise such a—”

“Stop. Stop.” His words are strained, but he’s laughing as he trails her around the kitchen while she spot cleans, eventually catching her in the corner, trying to keep her in place. She allows him to. To hold her chin and drop a gentle kiss to her lips. “Stop.”

She does it in jest of course. He must know—because they end up laughing at her goading, at her jibbing him, always elevating herself for the pregnancy.

But he also knows that no matter how hurt he is. No matter what he does. It will always amount to second place as long as she remains pregnant.

“You show up here, two hours late, beaten to a bloody pulp, from that—”

“Princess,” he groans, spinning in the spot, and reverting to trailing her around the house again. “Come on.”

“—place you’re only going to have to go back to in a few hours.” Somehow the jest as turned a bit viable to her, passing off what she’s saying as a joke when it’s all true, when it’s all been building up on them for the last few weeks. “Why didn’t you just stay over?”

“We made a rule that I never stay over.”

“I wouldn’t have minded.”

“I would have,” chuckles again, and when she doesn’t share his mirth this time around, he steps forward, taking her hand in his own. “Why would I sleep there, when I can sleep here beside you?”

“This isn’t because your double is still currently bunking in your room?”

“I mean—it is technically his room too—” when she starts away towards the bedroom, he catches up with her quickly, snatching her hand up again “—you know it has nothing to do with that.”

“I’m tired.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You really must be tired.” The bedroom is the hottest of the rooms as it juts off the house. Likewise, in the winter months, it’s the coldest. She misses when it was so delightfully cool in the short autumn, and even shorter winter. “You never give up that easy.”

“I’m not giving up, I’m just tired.”

“Then let’s go to bed.” He rolls back the comforter until it’s at the very base of the bed and slaps the mattress with his hand.

“When do you have to go back?” She takes a seat on the edge of the bed as he flits around the room, taking care of her now. Tossing her one of his shirts that has stretched so much, she can still use it as a nightshirt.

“I have to leave here in a few hours.”

“You poor man—” she rubs her hand under his chin, under the scruff that’s started to grow during his many excursions back to Earth, and feels his grin fall into her hand “—burning the midnight candle.”

He chuckles, kissing the inside of her wrist, leaning further across the bed. “That’s not the saying.”

“Mmm,” she hums as he crawls forward, flicking the stretched collar of his shirt down over her shoulder, and placing a hot kiss against her skin in suggestion. “I don’t think that matters much at the moment.”

He tilts her head towards him, capturing her lips in a kiss, his hand tugging up the shirt she just replaced. “Good.”

*

She wakes to the sun growing over the horizon, peeking through the window, warming her under the blankets. Josie stretches to her left, purring as she rubs against her stomach.

“Vala?”

Blinks to find the room still relatively dark, the bed empty next to her, but her husband rifling through their dresser drawers in search of something to wear.

“Darling?” Figures he’s going to passively mention that she should stop wearing his clothing, or at least increase the amount of laundry she does so he doesn’t have to wear the scraps of his clothes.

“Why isn’t the front porch creaking?”

With all the excitement of last night—the last few hours really—she’d forgotten to introduce Cameron to the fact that she may have had some repairs done to the house. “Well—”

“And when I went to go empty the pan we keep in the kitchen for the roof leak, imagine my surprise when—”

“Yes, yes.” She waves him off with a flick of her wrist, hoping that if she doesn’t respond with guilt, the situation will be easier to diffuse.

“What did you do?”

Calmly, she sits up, scratching Josie’s head as the cat’s purr reverberates through her body. The baby shuffles, probably equally angry at being roused. “You and I both know that there have been certain improvements needing to be made around the house for—”

“You did it while I was out?” He’s whipping around the t-shirt he’s managed to find, pacing around the room, clearly distraught.

“No, of course not.” She flips the comforter off of her, settling Josie into the middle of the bed to lay in the crests of the blanket and reaching for her hand as she shimmies to the edge of the bed. “I paid quite a large number of men to do it for us.”

“Honey—” he wrings the shirt between his hands, apparently trying to regain self control. She knows he had intentions of renovating the house himself, but between acting as a liaison for the SGC, scrutinizing the crops in the void of predawn, and every so often remembering that the baby’s room still needs to be assembled, there really is no time. He’s running himself ragged as it is “—do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

“Hiring contractors?” Waves a hand at him again, waddling to the end of the bed, the heel of her hand pressing into her lower back to relieve some pressure where the muscles have locked up while sleeping. “Don’t worry, Darling, I made sure that they didn’t swindle me.”

“Us. Swindle us.” He reaches to flick his rolled t-shirt at her accusingly, but when she groans, accentuating the pain in her back by stretching, his accusation turns into a limp flop. “You know any of those guys could be working for—”

“Yes, apparently Athena has just given up ruling a Fortune 500 company on Earth in order to send goons to a random planet scattered at the back of the solar system where it rains during a heat wave—” she slips around him to access the bedroom door and then the bathroom for her first of many pee breaks this day “—more concerned with near antiquated vendettas than—”

But he snakes his hand into hers, anchoring her in place, apparently intent on having this discussion. He’d better discuss fast or they’re going to have a leaking problem other than the roof.

“While you know Athena is always a threat, I didn’t mean her.”

She stares at their entwined hands because he does, and he hasn’t even managed to put on a shirt yet. If he’s due back on base when he said, he’s already late. “Who were you talking about then?”

“I was talking about your mom—”

She wrenches her hand away from him, pushing by him and through the door, stomping her way across the living room to the washroom. “We don’t talk about my mother.”

“Vala, I know you don’t want to talk about her—” he scrambles out of the bedroom, chasing after her until she slams the bathroom door in his face, locking it behind her. She doesn’t even get a single breath before he starts knocking. “Honey, we both know she’s a threat and we need to be—”

Sets her jaw at his indignation, that he might bring up her mother when she divulged information to him in a moment of trust, knowing he would do his best to sabotage research at the SGC to ensure no one stumble upon her gate address and open a wormhole to a veritable hell.

That is why he’s separated from her for so long, that is why he’s dedicated to his job once again, why they spend most days apart, and why he’s hesitant to bring her back to the SGC, lest they access her mother’s address, and she comes rampaging through.

As his pleading continues, muffled through the thick wood of the washroom door, she stops her pacing and pouting in the middle of the wooden room which heats up like a sauna in the summer weather, or after every long hot shower because there are no windows or ventilation ports. She should have asked those nice contractors if they could put in some way to drain the steam, but she was overtaxing the builders with the limited amount of time she gave them to preform their task.

Still ignoring the pleas of her husband through the door, she turns on the shower built into the far wall, effectively drowning out his attempt at consoling her or cajoling her into giving up the seven symbols that lead to her mother’s brutal planet.


	2. Branded

He doesn’t like the way they leave it, but she knows he has to leave, and as soon as the shower turned on, he knew she wasn’t going to see him off—hell, he’s lucky that they got to have sex during this visit. Usually she’s too tired, or too uncomfortable with the baby playing havoc on her kidneys, or too distraught because he leaves so damn much.

Sometimes he’s too tired from the hour trek through arid, empty fields to the gate with only his mind to entertain him, and he never just has good thoughts. 

He doesn’t want to, but he leaves.

But stops at the back door, listening to the dulled sound of water hitting the wooden slated floor—hoping that she might have a change of heart. Wants to write her a note, let her know that he didn’t mean to upset her, that he knows things between them have been strained, but he honestly doesn’t know how much she’ll appreciate it. 

Between his absences and her flipflopping hormones, all he does lately is make her upset, or—even worse—make her cry, and it’s not something he intends to do, but it’s like all she wants to do is fight.

After a day of destroying high clearance documents, or deleting files on the Jacksons’ computers, along with dodging everyone’s questions about how his personal life is—because at this point he doesn’t even know anymore—and he doesn’t want to do anything except keep her happy and go to sleep.

The screen door doesn’t squeak when he closes it behind him, another thing a group of random men fixed at his house when he wasn’t home. A group of random men hired by his very pregnant wife to fix up a house he was supposed to, and all he can think is how badly it could’ve gone.

Josie sees him off from the porch, screaming like a police siren when he reaches down to pet her.

The sun isn’t too high in the sky yet, but it’s starting to get into the season Vala says is in between spring and summer which is apparently just full of thunderstorms and dust storms just making everything overly humid and pressure filled, playing more havoc on her sinuses because she snores like a trucker after a long haul no matter where she falls asleep.

It also makes his hip act up, and sometimes getting up in the morning, or at night, or whenever he’s due back at base, is almost as painful as it was when he was first recovering. Sometimes he can’t move his leg, sometimes the pain shoots from his hip down to his foot, sometimes the muscles spasm and clench, making him shout in pain.

She’ll wake up beside him, clicking on the lamp, yawning as she still pulls his leg into what’s left of her lap, working her fingers over the muscles and scars. Laughs as his foot tenses up, hums in approval when his boxers start to tent.

It worries him because he’s not exactly young anymore—almost forty when he started being captain of SG-1 and add in the five years he and Vala have been dating—and the one they weren’t—he’s closer to over the hill—or under it—then not. She acts like there’s nothing wrong with him, when he starts to get tired more easily, when the old injury starts to flare up and it hurts so much that his military gait is reduced to a limp.

His age was the reason why Landry set him up for the promotion that got him out of the field and behind a desk—although Landry never told him this. When the job was offered to him, he was a little relieved and then a little offended—but she was proud of him, and that’s all that really mattered.

They went out to dinner, one of the first times they’d gone to a fancy restaurant—one where he didn’t have to shout into a box to order—as much as she found that amusing. She looked so beautiful all done up, and the pride he felt for the promotion, was nothing compared to the pride he felt when she hooked her arm through his.

Later Landry told him that they were really looking for a family man for the position, someone who needed to be grounded because he had a spouse and kids that relied on him, but apparently none of the many members of SG-7—who ended up with kids by the bushel—were qualified enough for the job.

Thinks about what it would be like to be back on Earth now, without all their dirty laundry hung out to air.

She’d be watching the snow fall in the backyard, waiting to ask him to build a snowman with her. Wanting hot chocolate when they got inside and tucking her icy feet under his ass to warm them while they watched shitty Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel.

She’d be happily off the team and content to spend her time at home waiting for the baby to get there. 

That’s when he knows he’s daydreaming, and he might have heatstroke.

She never stays put. Never stays still—even now, in the last few weeks of her pregnancy, she has this burst of energy, like her preoccupation with fixing up the house.

He’s not upset that she did, he’s upset that he couldn’t do it for her.

He’s upset that random, unknown men were near his very pregnant wife, and were fixing the roof above his kid’s nursery.

Trekking over the last hill, he can see the gate in the distance, gleaming in the sun.

He’s definitely getting too old for this shit—that’s for sure.

The easy way out would be telling the Jacksons or Landry what’s actually going on with the Clava Thessara Infinitas but that might be the one thing she doesn’t forgive him for.

She does a lot of little quirky things. Little dangerous things. Things that he’ll fume about for a few hours, maybe the whole day, but he always ends up forgiving her before they go to bed because he can’t go to sleep without her and he doesn’t want to.

But she can hold a grudge like an Olympic torch and keep the flame burning for weeks. Even after she’s forgiven him, she brings up what he did with little pokes, little barbs, and he thinks that if he spilled the beans on her mom—Jesus, who her mom actually is—that she’d disappear without even giving him a divorce.

The sound of his feet crunching over dry ground echoes throughout the plains—it’s more like clay, like kitty litter, and it brings him back to the sleek black cat with bright green eyes who hates his guts. The cat is going to end up staying in the house.

He knows that.

Knew that the moment he caved and let the cat stay to begin with.

The truth is, he sort of misses living with animals.

Misses having a dog, and goats, and chickens—he never really was a cat person, mostly because every single one he’s met hated him, but he never had anything against them.

Sure, Josie attacks him, waits for him around corners to pounce on him, only to then go and lovely trot up to Vala and rub her boney body up and down his wife’s legs, be he also knows Josie keeps Vala company more than he does these days, and with everything she’s gone through—everything she’s had to put up with—if a screechy cat that’s got a few bald spots and looks more like a Halloween decoration than a lap cat can bring her comfort, he’s not going to take that away.

Plus, Josie will probably love the kid, and the kid will probably love Josie back.

He’s not worried about that.

He’s worried about whether this kid will actually like him or not, because so far, all signs are pointing to no.

Maybe it’s scientific, has to do with his temperature or something, how the kid just stops kicking whenever he goes to interact with them, and he’s hoping it’s all just a big game of peek-a-boo—a game he can actually play—because at this rate, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to teach the kid how to play t-ball like Vala wanted.

Gave up coffee because he was worried about what it was doing to his system and every time he’s alone in the lab with the Jacksons’ brewed pot of gold, or he strolls by the mess and smells the robust scent it almost beckons him in.

But he wants to be able to chase his kid. To give them pony and airplane rides. To bounce them on his knee without his hip hurting.

Having a kid has never made him feel so old, and he doesn’t even have one yet.

He catches his breath at the gate that sits just outside the city limits. The place they stashed it kinda looks like a bus stop from downtown, the ones with the little awnings to keep it protected from rain and snow—and whatever else this crazy planet’s got planned.

If it were up to him—just him—he would grab some groceries, start the trek back, and talk to her. Force her to talk by patiently waiting until that guilt boils up in her. He doesn’t need to know the address to her mom’s planet—it would just make their lives a hell of a lot easier.

He wants to sleep in late beside her. Make her breakfast in bed. Play with her hair while it spreads over the pillow. Watch her fill out the puzzle book her brought her back all wrong, and just grin and bask in the moment.

There’s not much he wouldn’t do for her—although she keeps hinting that she wants her toes painted—toes she can’t reach—and he keeps changing the subject, pretending that he doesn’t hear her. 

After dialing the DHD, the gate blinks awake, and the chevrons start clicking into place.

He doesn’t want to be doing this—or at least he wishes she was with him, but he doesn’t want to bring her back to the mountain either. Too much stuff has happened in the last eight months, and he’s just trying to keep her and the baby safe—even if it means frequent time away from her because he’s busy sabotaging a mission he inherited from her, even if it means he has to work harder trying to help everyone recover lost information that he just deletes again.

They need to have a talk about it.

About where she wants to have the kid, because he has this horrible nightmare where he wakes in in a cold sweat to find her in labor—meaning she can’t do the hour trek—so he has to deliver the baby in the middle of the living room floor.

It’s not the birth story he wants to tell his kid.

It’s a nightmare—that’s all it is—he has them all the time where his teeth fall out, or where there’s just a gaping hole in his head—but this one seems more real, maybe because each SG team member has to do an in-field first-aid course—he’s only had to use it a handful of times, stitching up Sam, applying pressure or tourniquets, that one time when they all had allergic reactions to the food offered to them by the natives of P3X 401—but it doesn’t include how to help deliver a baby, and honestly, he’d be so terrified for Vala, for the kid, that he wouldn’t know who to worry about more—wouldn’t be able to concentrate, and even the thought of it is making him nervous.

Tired as ever, he drags his feet up the ramp to the gate, and steps through, no longer impressed or excited about riding through the wormhole.

Knowing that he’s been through the gate well over 500 times now.

*

The Jacksons are waiting for him on the other side. Not like they were back when they were both clo—not the original. Now, the original Jackson physically distances himself from his doppelgänger, and they stand on the opposite sides of the room.

Knows who the original Jackson is because he always wears his BDU jacket and his glasses most of the time. The other is usually always in a black t-shirt without glasses, but even if one day they got mischievous and decided to swap on him, could still tell them apart by their attitudes.

Jackson will greet him and lay right into the plans: where they’re at since he’s left, what they need to accomplish by the time he leaves and start walking towards his lab before he even gets to say hello. The second Jackson asks him about Vala, how she’s doing, if there’s anything she needs. If she’s going to come for a visit before her next doctor’s appointment.

When he retells this to her at night, sometimes sitting on the couch and looking out the front window to the stars, her hair spreading across her lap as he strokes a finger up and down her arm, or tickles one over her stomach, she just laughs at him. “Cameron, of course they have different attitudes. Daniel Two was created using a portion of Daniel’s personality—”

She goes quiet and he realizes she’s thinking about what part of the personality she was made from.

“I don’t care.”

Sometimes she grins, tries to lean up and peck the tip of his nose, flailing around until he helps her. Sometimes she doesn’t say a thing, and turns so her back is to him, which he just takes a suggestion to keep quiet. 

He doesn’t mean to upset her.

He never does.

It’s just getting to the point now that squinting into the sunlight can make her think he’s judging her because of her body, because of her mother, because of her creation—but he really doesn’t care—well, maybe about her mom because in-laws are never fun to deal with and apparently, this one is a real bitch.

He’s honestly more afraid of her getting angry and jumpstarting labor than he is about what her origins are. She’s Vala to him and that’s all—well, his wife, the mother of his unborn kid, his life partner—

Taking one last look over the knoll he crossed, he wishes they could talk about it without her feeling defensive because she feels ashamed. Wants to tell her that he’ll never judge her on the things she’s done, especially the ones she couldn’t control, but before he gets the words out, she’s either crying or fuming.

He’ll try again tonight.

Maybe wake up a little early and attempt to put the crib together so that she doesn’t hire a complete stranger to do what he should’ve had done a month ago.

If this is how their relationship is—there’s nothing wrong with it, and he can live with it—but he wants—needs—her to know that he hasn’t even given what happened at the ruins a second thought because every time he does, he gets preoccupied with how all he could have come back with is a bitchy clone of himself.

“You’re late.” Jackson greets him as he steps down the ramp, his boots clunking as both doctors fall in line walking beside him.

“Hit a little snafu before I left.” He rubs at the sweat on his forehead, not remembering the cut that she taped together is still relatively fresh. “Had a little snafu last night too, actually.”

“Are you okay?” Jackson Two, the bleeding heart, questions from his left, gesturing to his face. “Vala get upset that you were late again?”

“I mean, it’s not like we have the fate of the world to—”

“Actually.” He interrupts Jackson by clearing his throat, ready to sit down, gulp a bottle of water, and mess up whatever info they’ve found since yesterday. “I got jumped on the way home.”

“What?” Both ask in unison. It happens less often than when there were two duplicates and not an original, but it’s still just as weird.

“Yeah, three guys.” He scratches at the back of his head, not really wanting to go into details. “I don’t know what they wanted. I didn’t have any money on me.”

“Why didn’t you use your—”

“Because I’m not a card-carrying member of the SGC anymore, remember, Sunshine?” He tugs at the badge on the side of Original Jackson’s BDU jacket.

He’s never in uniform anymore. Doesn’t even know if he still has one.

“Yeah, but technically you are doing recon, right?”

“In the barest of senses, yeah.”

“Then why don’t you ask Landry for a weapon for protection?”

“Because I don’t want to owe anyone any favors.”

They turn down the corridor towards the Jacksons’ lab which has now been sanctioned off into two parts. Jackson wanted his space, which is warranted with the shock of finding out about his duplicates and his five years of frozen time, but he thinks it affects Jackson Two more than the guy lets on.

Even though Jackson only has limited interactions with his copy—always on base—he’s pretty sure Two got used to having a partner in crime, and now he gets a little lonely.

“I don’t want to be here right now, but I promised Vala I would—”

“We know, Mitchell.”

They step into the lab where makeshift walls have been constructed in the almost half-a-year since he’s been gone from active duty. Right now, they can move freely between the skeletal frames made of wood, but soon it will be decked out with drywall, or at least that’s what Jackson has been telling him for the last month.

“So, getting down to business.” Jackson slides a pile of folders down the table to him. When he flips back the cover, he’s greeted with numbers, latitudes and longitudes, varying angles of degrees, and how they all relate to constellations, then ancient constellations, then gate addresses. “We’ve found the right star system, but there are over seven-hundred planets within it. The Research and Development Team are doing scouting on various planets with MALPs and some of the SG teams but—”

“—so far they’ve all come back inconclusive.”

“You don’t say,” speaks absently, already not really interested in what’s been developed in the seven hours since he was gone. Instead, concentrating more on flipping through the pages given to him and deciphering what would constitute an old gate address.

“Yeah, it’s taking a long time—”

“—an eerily long time.”

When he glances up, both of the Jacksons are staring at him, waiting for input. “Meaning?”

“Meaning, we’ve been toying with the idea that someone has been sabotaging us.”

“You don’t say?” This time, it’s a little more forced.

Both Jacksons pull out a chair from the other side of the table in the cramped space, and he realizes that they didn’t need him for reconnaissance or research today, that this is really an interrogation.

“Anything you want to tell us, Mitchell?”

Now he just has to figure out, which one of them is good cop and which one is bad cop, and then somehow turn them against each other.

“We know things have been stressful for you these last couple of months with everything that’s happened—”

“—but that’s no reason to sabotage years of work.”

He snorts, shaking his head as he pushes away from the table, a little pissed off that they called him here for this, more pissed off that he had to walk an hour through the heat to get here, and even more pissed off that he’s gonna have to walk an hour in the heat home. “I have a laundry list of things I could be doing instead of trying to help you two play Goonies.”

“We have a gate system for the address, Mitchell. We reverse engineered your backtracking—”

“seven-hundred addresses down to fifty-two—”

“But we still don’t understand why you would—”

“Is this a vendetta?”

“What would Vala say?”

Before he responds, the walkie attached to his belt crackles to life, the Jacksons keep rambling until he holds his hand up to halt their accusations, so he can hear his wife’s voice.

“Cameron?”

“Yeah, Baby, I’m here.” Across the table, Jackson rolls his eyes, leaning more into the table, impatient for an answer, while Two moves away, always uncomfortable with their pet names and tokens of love.

“Cam—ron—on’t have much ti—”

He doesn’t need to hear the whole words to know what she’s talking about.

He jumps up from his chair, running down the hallway, his leg muscles aching from overuse, like the time he was almost sold into slavery and she showed up, all done up in her uniform, her hair perfect, and he could smell her shampoo from where they had him locked up.

“Is it go time?” There’s only the sizzle of static feeding through the speaker of the walkie. He waits a stupid amount of time for her to respond, standing in the doorway of the gate room. “Vala?”

“I—id”

“What? Honey, you’re breaking up—”

“ –ou musn’t—”

She’s gotta be having the baby. She’s almost nine months along—it takes her forever to do anything—she can’t really get that much bigger, and there’s only one place for the baby to eventually go. “How far are they apart?”

There’s a brief radio silence. The Jacksons have caught up with him now, standing at the base of the stairs, Harriman watching him, waiting for a cue to fire up the gate.

Then there’s her brief sigh of confusion, followed by, “what?”

“Your contractions, how far are they—”

“Is she in labor?” One of the Jacksons asks, peering over his shoulder as all three of them stare at the walkie in his hand.

The other, he’s assuming Two, asks, “can she make it back to the mountain on time?”

When he doesn’t’ answer, both fall silent beside him until the walkie sparks to life again.

“—Mm not—n labor—”

“Thank God,” he mutters resting the walkie against his head. Both Jacksons let out a sigh of relief in unison behind him, more than likely afraid they’d have to volunteer to be mobile obstetricians.

“—Amr—n!”

“Sorry, Baby, just happy that—”

But their lives are anything but ordinary.

“—’s here.”

The tone of her voice wipes the grin right off his face. He shoots a finger at Harriman, who nods, loading up the gate address for Thea. “Who’s there?”

“locked—athr—m, and—”

“Vala, who’s there?” Swirls his hand in a circle, impatient with how slow the gate is loading, as Harriman announces the third chevron, trying to keep her talking so he can figure out what’s happening.

If he can just get through the gate, the walkie will be clearer without a galaxy of interference.

“Other.”

“Other who?”

“Oth—r—can—ou”

“I can’t—” he’s panting now. Hasn’t even begun to run on his spent legs, the metal rod exuding more pain with each day. How is he gonna be able to chase his kid around if they never even get a chance to exist?

“Chevron six encoded,” Harriman announces over the speaker.

“Honey, I’m on my way now.” He’s panicking, his voice pitchy as he paces before the bottom of the ramp, watching the gate dial to the final symbol.

But as the _kawoosh_ fills the room, there’s a sudden loud thumping, banging, knocking, cutting through the static, and he wrenches the walkie back to his mouth. “Vala?” But then all he hears is static. “Vala?”

Everyone in the gate room is silent.

“Just hold on—” bites the inside of his mouth to keep his emotions at bay, because it’s not gonna help him get back home any quicker “—I’m coming.”

*

The farmhouse is gone.

Notices before he even gets there, while running through the plain with the Jacksons—who fumbled through the gate after him—he doesn’t see the familiar outline of their small home, or its stretched shadow across the flat ground cast by the morning sun.

Instead the smoke raising from the smoldering ruins of the house catches his attention, makes him run faster. He can do it. He used to jog everyday, sometimes twice a day. Lately he’s been sticking close to the house in case something went wrong, because he knows Vala, and he knows the foreboding feeling, and he knew that something was going to go wrong because everything was going too well.

He shouldn’t have left.

He isn’t as good at this as she is.

Not just the lying and the sabotaging, but the not being tethered to one place, to one person.

She is his person, and he should’ve either planned a daytrip for both of them to go back through the gate together, or stayed with her—should have come up with some reason to stay with her because she never would’ve accepted why he was staying so close, why he gave up his morning jog for a fifteen minute stroll with her through the fields to check on their crops, which were now embering ashes into the wind.

He calls for her as he approaches the house. Some of the rooms are still standing with only half walls and broken doors. Pieces of the new roof crunch under his feet as he clambers over them, hopping up fixed porch stairs that now look like they haven’t been refurbished.

Ignores the flames—the heat—as he twists, trying to place himself in a house he could no longer navigate.

Jackson calls to him from the front porch, crackling under the live fire, and Two crawls up the back stairs to help him look.

A gust of wind clears away the smoke for him to see something clearly enough.

The crib.

She must have built it.

Because he never got to it.

Wouldn’t have been any good anyway, he always missing a piece and ending up with an extra.

There’s no sign of her.

While she’s still missing from the fiery innards of their house, he didn’t stumble on her charred corpse either. The heat makes him so dizzy he feels sick to his stomach. He spins, stumbles, sifts through smoldering pieces of wood, calling for her until his throat is barbequed from smoke inhalation.

It takes both Jacksons to drag him out of the house just before the roof collapses in.

He has to rest.

As much as his spirit wants to fight, his adrenaline wanes from the run here, from the contact burns on the back of his hand from kicking over the remnants of the life they made together.

His mind swims on a sea of ashes, trying to float down different tributaries to find who took her. Who would want to take her?

It’s not the Jacksons in their invisible spaceship again, and the shock of staring at his house in ruins—the one he wanted to fix up, where he and Vala were going to start their family—makes him shake.

After an hour or so, the smoke reduces to a level that’s not as scarring to their lungs. He and the Jacksons wordlessly go back in the bare black bones of scaffolding and wooden frames rickety where they stand. Together they sieve through burnt up mementos like her picture of the team—the one he tried to glue and tape back together, charred up with curling corners and a hole burnt right through her face.

The crib melted into a pile of scorched plastic with a stench that cuts his breath. The purple room she wanted so long ago doesn’t even exist anymore, the living room—and those ornate teacups she set out to receive the company they never got—were smashed and crispy.

Their couch, their bed, their kitchen, everything razed down.

Everything except the bathroom.

And on his way there, he finds her.

Laying straight and stiff, with smoke wisping off her skin like her breath on all those early mornings she saw him off from the back porch. Her green eyes wide open, and her dark coat marred by open wounds—some from burns, some from something else—her bared yellow teeth still visible and her small pink tongue hanging to the side.

“Oh, Josie.” He mutters, running a hand over the cat’s open eyes to close them in respect. She’s warm to the touch, but long gone, probably before the fire judging by the amount of blood hardened into her fur.

Taking off his jacket, he wraps the cat up in it to offer a proper burial—even when his folks lose animals on the farm, they still always hold a little funeral, and add them to the little graveyard out by the chicken coop.

By the looks of her, the cat obviously went out fighting and there is only ever one thing he’s seen her defend.

Maybe Vala got away because of the cat, maybe she was able to call him because of her. He knows the cat became enamored with his wife and the scraps of meat she offered, but he didn’t think the little furball would have gone to this length to protect her, dying in front of the bathroom door while the whole house burnt down.

Only one of the bathroom walls toppled, not burnt by fire, but broken under pressure.

Knows Vala was in there because that’s where she goes to hide, that’s where she goes to feel safe. Once told him the walls were reinforced in case one of the sandstorms turned into a full-blown tornado.

Cradling Josie’s body, he peers around the room, searching near the floor by the scorched enamel tub, the melted shower head, searching for any sign, any clue Vala would think to leave. 

The Jacksons call to him, standing a few feet away from where the back porch was, from the swing where he’d sit with her every morning and share a peppermint tea, where they’d stare out at the field, at their slowly growing crops, as she tried to balance the teacup and saucer on her stomach, and he kept his hands steady as a goalie so she didn’t laugh and get third degree burns.

He won’t leave the bathroom until he finds it—whatever she’s left him.

He knows Vala better than he knows himself.

_Vala doesn’t like to be tethered down._

Two’s words course through his mind, and he knows that the Jacksons are probably discussing how easily she could have set this up in order to get away. The house is in her name, she’s the one with the fortune tucked away somewhere, and she gets nervous when she has to stay in one place for too long. 

_A child is going to anchor her to you for life._

She’s not like that anymore.

Sure, she needs her space every once in a while, sometimes she likes to just be by herself, and he’s got to respect that.

Sometimes he’s got to worry about her from a distance because he can’t suffocate her with his concern, he can’t change the way she is, and he doesn’t want to. He fell in love with all of her and that includes the antsy feeling she gets when she stays put for too long.

“You’ve lived a lot of places.” He told her once, stroking her hair as she lay curled against his chest, her cold feet mingling with his. Played with her fingers while she thought of an answer to the statement or didn’t.

“You didn’t join the air force to stay in on place, Darling.”

“No, but I’ve never seen anyone who needs to move around as much as you.”

“I’m nomadic.” It was one of her non-answers, accompanied by pressing her hands onto his chest, and touching her lips gently to his chin, trailing his jawline upwards. She sat up, straddling her knees around his torso, and arched in as he placed his lips to her collarbone. “It’s just something else to appreciate about me.”

“It’s almost like you think someone is after you.” Spoke the words against her skin, but she managed to hear them anyway.

Stiffened in his arms, and pulled away from him, her hands stilling in his hair. “How do you know someone isn’t?”

“Mmm,” hummed against the side of her neck, nuzzling his nose against her skin. “You on the lam from someone, Princess?”

“Mmm,” she hummed back, falling into his rhythm again, the weight of her balanced against the tops of his thigh. “From everyone, Darling.”

Knows that when she first walked into the SGC she was on the run from the Lucien Alliance—doesn’t know if she’s ever really repaid her debts to them, or if the SGC moniker protects her now, but this is to big to be part of the Alliance’s gig. He’s seen the types of bounty hunters they have; he’s seen the way they search, and it’s not this collective and vindictive.

If this were their work, there would be proof of it in her body, which shows that whoever did this, took her alive.

There are dozens of planets she can’t go back to. Planets where a bounty has been placed on her head—he still only has one wanted poster of her, but that’s enough. Thought the SGC backing her up—or previously backing her up—would have been enough to deter anyone seeking her out for a pay day.

Hell, she went back to being a freelance agent, and no one seemed to give a shit other than him.

Athena’s been after her for years because of the Clava Thessara Infinitas, but the trust has been tied up in internal affairs and facing charges of insider trading—stupid little charges meant to keep any remaining Goa’uld busy in litigations. Athena had insiders though—Vala was able to sniff out Gloria, but what if there were others that she didn’t finger on time. It has to be—

Then he sees it.

A few little scribbles on the bottom of the sink cabinet, so small that he thinks that they’re just smudged soot, but when he creeping in closer—still cradling Josie’s lifeless body—his feet crunching over glass, broken floor tiles, chunks of wall, until he steps on one of the only things she brought with her from Earth—a black makeup pen that just happens to by laying under some ash by the symbols.

“Jacksons,” he shouts, shooing away the smoke, gently dabbing around the note she left—knows she left because she knew he’d be searching for something to follow. “Get in here!”


	3. Metronymic

The symbols turn out to be a form of hieroglyphs.

It takes the Jacksons less than half an hour to cross-reference it with their extensive system of notes—he’s surprised they can’t just look at it and decipher it—but it is enough time for him to dig a grave for Josie, the cat that wanted to maul his ass every time she saw him. Keeps his jacket wrapped around her while lowering her into the hole and in the dim light of the setting orange sun, something glitters on her paw.

Gently, he pushes her claws out and slips off a small gold link. It looks like Goa’uld armor he’s seen in old reports, the kind he would read after midnight while waiting for her to get back from off-world.

Josie went out protecting his wife better than he ever did.

“Mitchell,” Two greets him just as he finished pushing the dirt back into the grave, ignoring the guilt because he didn’t even want the damn cat, and the cat might have been what saved her life. “We found a match.”

“Great.” He rubs his filthy arm sleeve against his forehead, which is also filthy, and it does nothing my smudge around more dirt. “What’d she leave us? A location? A hint?”

Both Jacksons stop and stare at each other briefly, before glancing back down to their data pads.

“Well—” Jackson starts, and he hates it when they do this shit because it makes him more nervous. They can’t just give him the good news. Can’t just tell him where he needs to go. “She gave us more than that.”

“What did she give us?”

“A name.”

*

“Anat.”

The Jacksons stand on each side of the projector, the original keeps the clicker in his hand as Two turns out the lights for the slideshow—he has no idea how any Jackson manages to whip up a PowerPoint presentation in such little time but has never been more grateful for it.

It took them a little bit longer to get back to the gate because he used his last burst of energy running to the farmhouse. Two kept trying to calm him—this was after he screamed a chain of curse words into the noon sun and the empty fields that would’ve made his grandma take to his hide with a rolling pin.

While Dr. Lam looked him over and only recommended a shower and a couple glasses of water—the Jacksons whipped up an in-depth catalogue of all the info they could scrounge up on the single set of symbols she left behind.

“Anat?” Landry questions beside him, not sure what exactly is going on, but volunteering to help—it almost feels like he’s trying to make up for what the IOA did before. 

The Jacksons wouldn’t let him get a sneak peek of the files since as soon as he knew the gate address, he would’ve left. Like it was that easy—if only it wasn’t that easy.

It never is.

“Said in some cultures to be the wife of Ba’al—” Jackson clicks and images of carvings, of hieroglyphs, of bronze statues “—she’s a Goa’uld system lord.”

“Great,” Landry sighs, shifting in his chair, glancing over at him, but his eyes never stray from the screen.

He wants to know everything about it.

He wants to know how to kill it.

“There’s a lot of dispute religiously, of what or who Anat is—”

“Time is of the essence, Dr. Jackson.”

“Basically,” Jackson sighs, clicking again through the slides that show areas of worship on a map of Asia, then lands on a passage from a thirty-page report—one he’s already halfway through, because the quicker he knows his shit, the quicker he can get her back. “She’s the God of War.”

“And how does Ms. Mal Doran factor in to all this?”

The Jacksons keep silent, even at Landry’s questioning brows, and instead stare at him, waiting for him to give the answer.

“She’s Vala’s mom.”

“What—”

Landry squints his eyes, as the slide clicks into place showing grainy footage of Vala hosting Qetesh, of her body—weakened from malnutrition, from overexertion, from fighting—is donned out in golden armor and a thin gauze dress billows between her legs while she sits on a throne, her body bony and angled regally, like the face on the back of a coin.

Her expression is empty.

Her eyes are dead.

“I’m sorry doctors, but I’m afraid I’m not following you here—”

But he interrupts before the Jacksons have a chance to answer, because right now, the last thing they need is the spread of more misinformation.

“Anat is hosted by Adria, Vala’s mother.”

That bit of info gets everyone in the room to stop and stare at him. He sits ramrod straight, watching the repeated grainy reel of Qetesh stepping to and sitting in her throne, while he waits for the eventual question.

“I thought Adria was Vala’s stepmother?” Two questions from where he’s positioned by the light switch, his back to the screen—the way he’s been standing since they introduced the footage of Qetesh.

“And I thought Adria was her daughter,” Landry huffs.

“When I met Vala on the Ori ship, she told me she named Adria after a stepmother than she despised,” Jackson clicks to the next slide which is thankfully blank. He’s got reports to read, they’ve got numbers to crunch, and they need to get back at it because they don’t have a lot of time.

She’s due in six weeks.

But they all keep staring at him, waiting for a revelation, the one she shared with him while she stood in their kitchen, worried that he was going to get pissed with her for lying the last six years when she was only trying to protect herself, only trying to protect them.

How she told him exactly two sentences about her mother: her name, Adria, and that she sold herself to be the host to a Goa’uld.

All he offers them is a coy grin.

“She lied.”

*

He doesn’t remember how many days it’s been, just that he hates being confined inside this stupid mountain doing research.

Doing anything.

Anytime she’s not with him.

Refuses offers of dinner, of hitting up a barbeque joint, or the great taco place downtown, because she’s not here, and he keeps having flashbacks to the time that they had that massive fight. The one where he told her how much she meant to him, and she got awkward and cold because back then he didn’t know how badly she accepts true compliments, true expressions of love.

He took it personally.

While she tried to talk calmly to him about their relationship, about how she felt the same, but couldn’t tell him she loved him until more trust was earned, he got more and more upset because he felt like he couldn’t live without her—still can’t—and the fact that she couldn’t reciprocate the feeling translated that he meant less to her than she did to him.

That she didn’t love him.

So, he got upset because he was hurt, and he said things to make her upset and hurt too, because if she couldn’t feel the same love that he had, he would make her feel the same pain he did.

And then he left.

Drove away from the mountain, leaving her underneath, knowing full well that they’d had a great weekend planned, knowing that he was her get-out-of-jail-free card in the most basic sense of the word.

When she called him at home, tried to apologize, pleaded with him to go back to her—he refused to listen and stayed at home, because no matter what she said, it still wasn’t “I love you too.”

So, he took away her freedom, and then didn’t understand when she wouldn’t listen to him—when she refused to let him comfort her. 

Now he stays under the mountain for her because he’s not leaving until he can leave with her. 

“You need to get some fresh air, Son.” Landry remarks half in a huff of disbelief, and half in a gruff chuckle.

He’ll get some fresh air with her.

The backlight from the computer screen is the only light that’s been shining on his skin recently. He stays in the Jacksons’ office until they kick him out, which he thinks they stopped doing a day or two ago—all of them are blending together now.

The hours into days, the days into weeks, and all he can think about is how she only has six of them left.

Had.

Landry calls them together once a day, usually late morning—he knows because everyone is more alert then—and asks what they’ve found, which is usually nothing, just a few dozen gate addresses that they need to sift through, that they need to send MALPs out to, or teams out to, and they don’t have time.

They didn’t have time to begin with, and it’s already been too long.

“All right,” Landry nods this morning when no one has really anything to add, when he can’t focus on anything but her last words to him, cutting out, garbled by static, by a distance that shouldn’t have been there. “Anyone think of any new plans?”

He stands silent, like he’s at a funeral for a fallen comrade, like he’s at his first de-hosting of a Goa’uld—his first and last—how she didn’t want to talk when she came back, how he took her out for what was supposed to be beers, but she decided on the fly that she wanted a milkshake instead. How it was the first time he sat across from her in the early morning at a McDonalds and watched her play with her food.

No one says a thing of course.

It’s just him and two Jacksons—the people who love Vala the most—but they can’t spare more than that, and if the three of them, who know her as best as she’ll let them, can’t figure out where the hell she got taken to, then no one else will.

“Actually,” Two clears his throat, causing Landry to pause as he stands. “I had one—well, it’s more of an idea.”

“We’ll work with whatever we have, Dr. Jackson.”

There’s a bit of a smirk on Two’s face because most of the SGC just assumed having the two Jacksons would blow over. When One died in the ruins and the original Jackson came back, there were some behind the door discussions of what to do with the remaining copy—even what rights Two has—but since there are no variations in their DNA, just slightly in personality, with Jackson’s blessing, they started treating Two like him.

He should have told Vala about it when he had the chance, maybe it would have made her more open to coming with him—but he didn’t want to make her more uncomfortable—he didn’t want to put her back underground again.

“I was thinking that someone has to know their way through that part of the gate system. That maybe we could hire a guide to—”

“Vala was supposed to be our guide,” Jackson reminds, still a little old school, but he did miss almost five years of his life.

“She stopped us from contacting a planet with a Goa’uld system lord who has destroyed dozens of planets—” they’re his first words in the meeting and the gruffness of his own voice surprises him. They don’t carry peppermint tea in the mess anymore.

“She should have told us—”

“She doesn’t have to tell us everything—”

“When it deals with galactic security, she should—”

“Gentlemen,” Landry fully stands now, pushing away from the table, his hair growing a little whiter each day. “While the idea has merit, I think Dr. Jackson is right, there’s simply no one we can trust to use as a guide.”

Two clears his throat, his eyes a bit downtrodden. In one of the three conversations he’s managed to have with Sam since she left, she says he’s a lot like Jackson was when he first started at the SGC. “Actually, Sir, there is.”

Landry stops and the room falls quiet, the presentation screen still black against the wall. “You have someone who has a concrete reason for telling us the truth?”

“Better.” Two shares a slight grin. “I have someone who will want to get Vala back.”


	4. Deadbeat

The plan is actually genius, one of the Jacksons’ better for sure.

Initially, he’s not onboard with asking an outsider for help, especially when Vala has a tendency for screwing people over and burning bridges. They have to be careful that the person actually wants to see Vala return home safely, or they have to offer such a crazy reward for her safe return that the person guarantees it.

Two does even better by suggesting someone who wants both.

Thinks that finding him isn’t going to be easy though.

He’s been at the grift game for years and covers his tracks pretty well—not as well as her, but it’s always up to the pupil to overthrow the master.

They put out a bulletin for him on all friendly planets and offer a huge amount of money for his capture and surrender—alive. The next step is contacting jailers and bounty hunters willing to take up the call—but it never comes to that. 

If he loves one thing more than his daughter, it’s money.

Jacek turns himself into SGC airmen on a neutral planet just a gate ride away. After being searched and cuffed for good merit—although he tried to sweet talk his way through the whole thing—steps through the gate unarmed two days after posting the bulletin.

“I came here unarmed. I listened to your requests.” He holds up his zip tied hands from under the interrogation table. “Is this the way you treat prisoners of war?”

“Who says you’re a prisoner of war?” Jackson questions from where he and Two sit on the opposite side of the table.

Pleaded with Landry to let him do the interrogation, because he knew Jacek better than the Grady Girls, he knows a bit more about his estrangement with Vala, he could get it done quick—but the general said his mind wasn’t in the right place.

He’s probably right because every time he closes his eyes he sees a charred farmhouse and a melted pile of plastic that used to be a crib.

“All I know is you offered me an awful lot of naquadah to show up here and be treated like a prisoner.” Jacek’s face is calm, but from his viewpoint behind the raised double mirror, he can see her dad’s hands move under the table, fidgeting, trying to get out of the ties. “Whatever information you have on me, I guarantee that you’ve been misinformed.”

“Is that so?” Landry questions as he enters the interrogation room, crossing with his hands relaxed at his side.

Already knows which angle the general is going to play—the reformed deadbeat dad.

Right now, he just wants the chance to be a deadbeat dad.

“I have a lot of enemies—” Jacek abandons his plans to slip his hands out of the zip ties and instead, is trying to hook the plastic on any jag sticking out from the table. “A lot of people would pay a pretty price to get to me.”

“Then why did you answer our request within two days?” Jackson questions almost scornfully—he hasn’t had that much experience dealing with Jacek, was preoccupied during his last visit to the SGC. There’s no doubt that Vala and the Jacksons are close, but they’re probably not privy to the details she’s fed to him over the years—how hard it was to break the habit of stealing things so easily, of tricking innocent people, of pulling cons when she brought up doing it, when it was the only time she received praise.

“Because your offer was too good to pass up.” Jacek grins widely, lifting his hands, still zip tied, but no longer stuck together. No one in the room seems to react or care, and his father-in-law seems dismayed by the lack of reaction to his magic trick. 

“Well—” Jacek clears his throat, his hand rubbing against he opposite wrist “—that, and I just assumed Vala wanted to see me.”

“Why would she want to see you?” Two barks out a laugh, leaving Landry and Jackson a bit shocked by his attitude.

“To let me know I’m a grandpa.” No one in the room speaks a word. “Again.”

“You know she’s pregnant?” Jackson questions, trying to keep an even stance. Usually, they’re so better at interrogations, but it’s way to close this time, too personal, and they’re all looking for someone to throw the blame on.

Someone’s ass to kick.

“She told me the last time I was here—Did she name them after me?” Jacek straightens in his chair, craning his neck to look around the cinderblock walls of the interrogation room, stopping at the mirrored window and waving. “Hi kitten.”

Behind the glass he shakes his head, his face falling into his palm with a groan.

“Jacek,” Jackson begins, ignoring the man’s dramatic flair—as much as she likes to attribute all of her best traits to her mother, he can see where she gets a lot of her mannerisms just by watching Jacek still try to remove the ties, chuckling nervously from the side of his mouth. “We’re here to talk to you about your wife.”

“She’s my ex-wife.” Jacek almost immediately corrects.

“Fine, your ex-wife.”

“Which one.” The room remains quiet for a moment, and Jacek even stops tugging at the plastic before realizing that the Jacksons and Landry aren’t in a joking mood. After enough silence, he clarifies, “you’re going to have to be more specific, there’s eight, well, that I know about. I’m a bit of a free spirit, always trying to—”

“Adria.”

Two’s patience has apparently run out.

So have Jacek’s words.

Another silence consumes the room this time, but instead of being based on irritation, annoyance, or on running out the clock, it’s based on fear.

“Wh—what?” Jacek chuckles again, no longer for show, no longer nervous, no longer just out the corner of his mouth. His fidgeting evolves into him flipping around in his chair, looking left and right, trying to plan a way out. “I don’t—I have no idea who—what you’re talking about.”

“We’re talking about your ex-wife.” Landry leans back in his chair, more relaxed with the upper hand.

“Vala’s mother,” Two adds.

“I don’t know who her mother is,” it’s another chuckle and it almost sounds like he’s regained his composure, but the fear behind his body movements, his constant scanning of the room says otherwise. Finally, his gaze lands back on the mirror and his face falls expressionless. “I have seven kids I know of. I don’t have that kind of time.”

“We’re not asking you to remember all your ex-wives and all your children,” Jackson leans in a bit on the table, and maybe this is him playing bad cop—they contacted Teal’c to return from aboard The Hammond with Sam, but Jacek got here first. “We just want to talk to you about Adria—”

“Adr—who?” The nervousness returns as Jacek stands, his gaze never leaving the mirror.

Jacek doesn’t think he’s staring at him—hell, he’ll be surprised if her dad even remembers him—he thinks Vala is up here, and the expression he’s making is for her. But what he’s trying to figure out is what emotion Jacek is trying to convey to her. Anger? Disappointment? Regret?

“Listen, it’s been fun kids, but I’ve got to go.” Jacek starts to move around his side of the room, pacing like a wild animal caged, trying to figure out the best way around the three men who stand in his way.

“Jacek, we just want to ask—”

“Let me make this abundantly clear—” her dad pauses, his body stiff, his arms at his side, and his fingers twitching. The humor, the jest drained from his voice, from his face. “—whatever question you’re going to ask me—I _promise_ you, I don’t know the answer.”

“Mr. Mal Doran,” Landry is growing tired with having to deal with dramatic adults all day. He remembers how it is being the boss. One problem snowballs into two more, then four—how if the base problem, the Clava Thessara Infinitas, was dealt with, that none of these other issues would have happened.

How deep down, she didn’t tell them and continued working on her own, because after five years, she still didn’t trust them with her deepest secret.

Still didn’t trust him until there was nothing he could do about it.

“All we’re looking for is a gate address,” two explains.

“I don’t know the address—”

“You don’t even know the one we’re after,” Jackson interrupts, sitting stagnant in his chair, growing more tired with Jacek by the minute.

“I know, and I’m telling you I don’t know it—”

That’s enough.

He always leaves these things too long.

Would wait too long when she’d go missing on missions. Always hesitated because he didn’t know if she was worth risking his career for. 

He knows now.

Silently he leaves the observation window—tired of watching the world’s worse opera—and without pause, he barges into the interrogation room. All four men pause their arguments, pause auctioning off naquadah, cargo ships, and opportunities for just one single gate address. 

Landry gives him a heavy glare, one that a couple of months ago would have meant to get his ass out of the room or face the repercussions, respect the chain of command, the order of importance.

But his order of importance has changed, and he’s not waiting any longer to get her back. He’s not sitting around staring down a list of gate addresses when he could be popping through each one and looking for her himself.

When they could be bribing the right people instead of the uncooperative ones, no matter how close to the cause they are.

Or maybe they’re just not giving the right information.

He turns away from Landry, away from the Jacksons—one on each side of the table to block off Jacek’s exit, and instead directly addresses his father-in-law.

“It’s Vala.”

Jacek stops his hemming and hawing, he deescalates from wanting to jump the hurdle of the table and take off for the gate room. His fingers still at his side and he’s not to sure, but her father might wear the same pulled expression of trying not to fall apart that he does at her name. “Vala?”

“She’s due at the end of the month, and they—” he takes in a shaky breath, his hand covering his mouth for a moment as he tries to focus on anything but anyone in the room. Tries to think about what she would say to calm him if she was here. “Anat’s got her.”

A thick silence envelopes the room as all five men think about what that could possibly mean. He tries to steer away from the worst-case scenarios because he thinks that with all that’s happened in the last year, they deserve a happy ending.

Jacek finally speaks, his voice gravelly, his eyes glinting just slightly, “get me a pen and a piece of paper.”


	5. Father-In-Law

A MALP is readied immediately to go to the address. The Jacksons spend a few minutes cross referencing it to the list of potential planets where Anat could be.

“You’re better off going to an abandoned planet, and sending in something that way,” Jacek remarks half-heartedly, his joviality completely drained. “She’ll try to come through.”

“And if she makes it?”

“She’ll destroy it all.”

“You know—” wants to stay silent, but can’t because if this all goes belly up, if something happens, he might not have the opportunity to do this again. “Vala’s told me a lot—more than most people— about growing up, about things she remembers from her childhood, but she never told me how her mom became a Goa’uld.”

Left out how Vala revealed this information to him only a month ago. Vala always takes care of herself better than anyone else can, and that he’s always left in the dark until it’s nearing too late. 

“Then, I guess there’s a reason she doesn’t want to tell you.”

“She blames herself—” he ignores her dad’s words, his verbal misdirection so he doesn’t have to talk about his ex-wife currently being puppeted by a massacring alien, or the daughter that he used until she didn’t fit into his plans anymore. Until she became a commodity. “For everything bad that’s ever happened she always blames herself.”

When he glances up, Jacek’s watching him intently, not hanging his head in shame like he would be. “You know that right?”

“You want to know what happened?” There’s an edginess to the older man’s voice, one he’s never experienced with the usual prankster. “Her mother needed cash and got it in the wrong way.”

“Because conning and stealing are the right ways to make money?”

“Over selling yourself to a monster? I’d say so.”

After a brief pause, during which all he can hear is the hum of the fluorescent lights, he continues, starting to think that maybe Jacek doesn’t have all the info either.

“You know Vala was—”

“I know.” Jacek interrupts him tersely, his lips pulled tight and his hands—still wrung with zip ties—are flat on the table. It’s the first time he’s seen the man actually aggressive, despite everything he’s done, the first time he thinks her dad might actually take a swing at him.

There’s a lot Vala has told him, but even more she hasn’t. Never told him how she came to be host to Qetesh, or for how long, and suddenly, especially adding her mother in the mixture, it seems like she was forced into the family business.

“Look—” Jacek grins, attempting to diffuse the situation, but that has nothing to do with the fact that in a month a baby will be born sharing both their bloodlines, but like everything else he does, it’s for his own benefit. “I’ve given you fellas—who all look remarkably alike, does Earth have a limited gene pool or something?—”

He doesn’t even bother changing his expression for a response.

“The point is, you corralled me here for information, which I gave you—”

“I told you, we need to make sure the info you gave us is good. The moment we have confirmation that the address is to Anat’s planet, then you’ll get your naquadah and be on your way.”

“You’ll get confirmation through her attacking, and no offense, but I don’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity of a God of War on a rampage.”

While he understands not wanting to go toe-to-toe with a Goa’uld—hell, he’s only had the displeasure of meeting Ba’al about a dozen times, and that was enough for him—but he can’t condemn the way he speaks about his family, his former spouse.

“She’s your wife.”

“She’s my ex-wife.”

“Uh-huh—” and the unconcerned nature he has concerning Vala, their child, comes off as an act, because from what he knows of Jacek, the guy isn’t bad, just annoying. “Did the ‘ex’ part come before or after the body controlling alien parasite?”

Jacek laughs, trying to cover the offense he can clearly see on his face. “I don’t know why you’re getting all upset over nothing—”

“To me, she’s something.”

“Apparently.” Jacek leans back in his chair, his hands folded triumphantly over his chest. “But a something that concerns you how, exactly?”

Without a shred of hesitation, he declares, “she’s my wife.”

“Well, that would explain it.”

Expects more of a reaction—hell, when he told his folks, his mom almost knocked him out for not inviting them to the wedding. Even after he told her that there wasn’t one, she was still upset, still got that sudden silence to her, the kind she would use when he was a kid to let him know he hurt her.

“You didn’t ask my permission.” Jacek’s got his old sly grin back, the kind she gets when she’s doing something to egg him on, to piss him off—lately, she’s been wearing that grin a lot. “Unless they don’t do that kinda thing on this planet.”

“No, they do.”

If Vala wasn’t from someplace out in the back forty of space, he would’ve asked her folks for permission—the part of him that’s just a bit Southern and a lot old-fashioned. The kind that wants to make sure she’s safe at home, knitting oblong baby onesies, while he goes to work saving the planet.

The small snippet of him that just craves a boring life.

But he didn’t join the air force for a boring life.

He didn’t join the SGC for a boring life.

He didn’t start a relationship with her for a boring life.

Everything good that’s happened to him has happened because he craves excitement.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit rude not to ask?”

If it were Vala speaking, she would give one of her little curt huffs at the end. She’d be working him over with that pout, and the twinge of her lips—Jacek just asks it nonchalantly, like he should be ashamed for not tracking him down through half the galaxy.

“I dunno.” Anger starts to well in him—how everyone expects so much of them when they were just trying to live their own damn lives. They weren’t hurting anyone—they were on another damn planet—but everyone came for them anyway. “Isn’t it a bit rude that you abandoned her for a few decades.”

“She’s an adult, she can handle—”

“Then why are you here now, Jacek?” He told Landry—promised—that he wouldn’t let his anger get the best of the situation. That he was fine to sit with Jacek while waiting for the gate address to be sorted out. He’s trying so hard to keep his word, but knowing what her dad has done to her, how he’s only around when he’s being compensated—even now when he knows that Vala is in immediate danger. “I mean, aside from the payment.”

“Because you guys are dealing with something you’ve—”

“We’ve dealt with Goa’uld before. We’ve gotten rid of a lot—”

“And that cocky attitude is just gonna get you killed quicker, Son.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Jacek grins and it’s the one he knows from her. The one she gets when she knows she’s struck a nerve with someone—usually a Jackson, or some superior—and that she can pick away at it until they lose face. Until they’re so infuriated with her that they let her do what she wants in order to get rid of her. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to call you? You are dating my—”

“We’re married.”

Points to the ring on his finger, a simple band of metal they purchased at one of the bazaars they went to full of wooden and cloth stalls barely held together. Different species shouting in different languages about what they were selling, and she grinned through the whole thing. Held his hand and directing him confused—nervous—through the crowds of people to a jewelry hut where they picked out a ring for him.

“Congratulations,” Jacek responds flatly, then adds, “Son.”

“If she doesn’t consider you a father, then neither do I.”

With a bit of a huff, like he’s trying to shrug off how much the comment actually hurts him, Jacek questions, “this your first kid?”

He doesn’t want to answer and isn’t sure why he does—maybe this is her father’s attempt at trying to figure out more about him, since whether they like it or not, they are family.

Maybe it’s because his kid isn’t even here yet, and he’ll still take any opportunity to talk about them because they were a secret for so long.

“Yeah.”

“It’s gonna be a boy.” A wistful look passes Jacek’s face, and his arms start to loosen from around his chest. “I never had a son. Eight kids that I know of, and they’re all daughters. I always wondered about the dynamic switch, you know? Maybe a son would have loved me more. Maybe they would—”

He ignores the pity grab, the way that Jacek is trying to guide the conversation, so he sympathizes with a man who has eight daughters, and none of them want a single thing to do with him—instead, focusing on what interests him. “Why do you think it’s a boy?”

“Because she only has boys.” He gives a half-hearted tug on the remaining zip tie, not even trying anymore. “That’s one of the reasons Anat’s got it in for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“When Anat would—wait, you said she told you about this?”

“She hasn’t told me much about anything.”

Which is still more than she tells most people.

Even if she doesn’t want to divulge every one of her past secrets to him, it doesn’t bother him. He knows that she trusts him, that he’s earned her trust, and he’s proud of that.

“Then there’s probably a reason for that.”

Another Mal Doran tactic, coercing the enemy, bonding with them over one of their interests, or a topic they’re into—say an unborn child—and then right when they’re on the brink of divulging information, right when they’re about to tell something that’s life changing, they back track, almost taking the words out of the air and putting them back in their mouths as they grin smugly.

He’s seen her do it before when under interrogation.

Sometimes when he, or the Jacksons need info from her and they’re rushing their words and already exasperated with her for not participating of freely giving them what they need, she’ll say there’s a reason why or she’ll ‘forget’ what they were talking about, and despite all the reminders in the world, they’ll never get what they need from her.

This tactic is even less funny when they’re being interrogated by an outside source, like an off-planet prison, or jail, or police, or the Lucien Alliance. Seen her take a hit more than once for it, when she could have just stayed silent, and when he gave her shit for it, she told him it was important to assert dominance.

To let them know she was still needed alive.

So even if he wants the information—if some part of him wants to bond with her dad, talk about his future kid because he doesn’t get the chance to with many other people—he has to remember that Jacek’s always looking out for himself first.

That he’s screwed over Vala tons of times in the past.

“I’m gonna go see how the team’s doing contacting the gate, so that we don’t have to deal with—

Without meaning to, he groans when he stands. He didn’t bring his pills back with him and he hasn’t been down to Lam to get a refill, because he’s had more important things to do.

He should have set a little time aside for it though because his leg is killing him, but somehow it still doesn’t seem important. 

Finding her is still his number one priority.

“Oh, that doesn’t sound good—” Jacek gives him that same grin, the one with an evil flair. “Just a question, but how do you plan on keeping up with a toddler if you can’t stand up from a table?”

“Let me make this perfectly clear, Jacek.” Ignoring the pain in his side, ignoring the want to slip into the workout room and punch the hell out of something, ignoring the fact that he promised her, while laying next to her in bed one night, that he would be there for the baby’s birth—he stands straight, tall, military style as he talks down to his father-in-law. “If you impede this mission in anyway, I’ll make sure you’re tried on the side of your Goa’uld ex-wife.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means stay out of our way.”


End file.
